Fully-Integrated 5.2 GHz GaAs MESFET Transmitter MMIC for High Capacity Wireless Local Area Network Applications

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) applications are currently available at 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz. It is desirable to implement WLANs at the 5.2 and 5.8 GHz frequency bands because of the higher available bandwidth and potentially higher data rates that they offer. It is important to have low power, low cost, high performance RF circuits for these systems. We have demonstrated an integrated 5.2 GHz transmitter circuit capable of sending highly efficient modulation schemes, such as QAM, that are suitable for multimedia networking applications. To achieve high performance with low cost, the circuits were designed into the TriQuint TQTRx 0.6 micron gate length GaAs MESFET process with 20 GHz f sub t. The supply voltage was chosen to be 3.3 V for mobile operation. To minimize the cost the circuits were laid out as compactly as possible.